If you don’t know, you should. Because media manipulation currently shapes everything you read, hear and watch online. Everything.

In the old days, we only had a few threats to fear when it came to media manipulation: the government propagandist and the hustling publicist. They were serious threats, but vigilance worked as a clear and simple defense. They were the exceptions rather than the rule—they exploited the fact that the media was trusted and reliable. Today, with our blog and web driven media cycle, nothing can escape exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and simplification.

I know this because I am a media manipulator. My job was to use the media to make people do or think things they otherwise would not. People like me are there, behind the curtain, pulling the puppet strings. But that is about to get harder: I’m spilling my secrets to you and turned my talents from exploiting media vulnerabilities to exposing them—for your benefit.

Today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.

Everyone is in on the game, from bloggers to non-profits to marketers to the New York Times itself. The lure of gaming you for clicks is too appealing for anyone to resist. And when everyone is running the same racket, the the line between the real and the fake becomes indistinguishable.

The Rise of the Manipulator
At top of the pantheon of the media manipulators, of course, sits the late Andrew Brietbart. “Feeding the media is like training a dog,” he once said, “You can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.” And learned it did: they followed his lead exactly in the Shirley Sherrod story, and continue to fall for the manipulations of his student, James O’Keefe, who has ravaged NPR, ACORN, and many other liberal organizations.

But in this rising class, I also place some unlikely figures. Michael Arrington, former editor and founder of the popular blog TechCrunch. Manipulator is the only word for Arrington, a man who once said “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap” and made $25 million from around that fact. Nick Denton and his cabal of Gawker writers—partially paid by how many visitors their posts get—use the same tricks to get your attention and sell it to advertisers. You can see it in how Brian Moylan, one of Denton’s minions, once explained the art of online headlines: “[the key is to] get the whole story into the headline but leave out just enough that people will want to click.”

And the old threat of government abuse of the media? We know that the Bush administration was a pro at it. Think of Dick Cheney leaking bogus information to Judith Miller at the New York Times as an anonymous source and then citing himself (without disclosing the conflict) to justify the build up to the war in Iraq. He planted the information which he then alluded to as support. That happened in 2002. Today, this loop is even easier, because as political strategists like Christian Grantham admit, “Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won’t print. So they’ll give those stories to the blogs.”

So it goes: manipulators on both sides of the equation—the writers and the marketers and press agents—all influencing the news to their own benefit. I know because I used to be one of them. I plied the trade for bestselling authors and billion dollar brands. I can recognize manipulation when I see it…because I invented many of the plays myself.

Where It Comes From and What to Do About It
Media manipulation exploits the difference between perception and reality. The media was long a trusted source of information for the public. Today, all the barriers that made it reliable have broken down. Yet the old perceptions remain. If a random blog is half as reliable as a New York Times article that was fact checked, edited and reviewed by multiple editors, it is twice as easy to get coverage on. So manipulators (myself included) play the volume game. We know that if we can generate enough online buzz people will assume that where there is smoke there is fire…and the unreal becomes real.

This all happens because of the poor incentives. When readers don’t PAY for news, the creators of the news don’t have any loyalty to the readers either. Everything is read one off, passed around on Facebook and Twitter instead of by subscription. As a result, there is no consequence for burning anyone. Manipulators can deceive journalists because journalists are not held responsible for deceiving readers.

To combat these manipulations, we must change the incentives. If we want loyalty to the truth, we must be loyal to the people who provide us with it—whoever they are. This probably means paying for information in one form or another. It means we have to be more patient. Good information takes time to acquire after all. The idea that news can be given to us iteratively and reliably is preposterous. Screw Michael Arrington. I’d rather have my news right than first.

In 2008, in his bestselling book The Pirate’s Dilemma, Matt Mason argued that the tech-savvy, remix mindset was (and eventually would) dominating popular culture. The people in these communities weren’t thieving pirates, he felt; they were digital entrepreneurs who would remake our media institutions in their image, and everything from sneakers to music would feel their impact.

With studies now showing the piracy not only doesn’t hurt box office or album sales but actually boosts them, and people like Sean Parker became billionaires, Mason’s prophecy has mostly come true. And fittingly, Mason himself now holds a position that couldn’t have existed too long ago. He’s the executive director of marketing for BitTorrent, a company that now has more than 160 million users and raised more than $40 million in funding. The BitTorrent protocol is used by companies as diverse as Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook.

The technology was once almost exclusively used by consumers to share copyrighted materials. But BitTorrent Inc. (the company that owns the protocol) never endorsed piracy and is now becoming the new best friend of the record labels, studios and game developers with its moves to put legitimate content in front of consumers and by adding ways to monetize that content. So I asked Matt about the monetizing content distribution and the future of peer-to-peer content. His answer is worth reposting in full, because it shows what he and other such advocates have always believed: file sharing was driven underground because of bad laws, poor understanding and greedy companies. Today, now that culture is catching up, the technology is being put to good use—just as the pirates had always advocated it could be. In his own words:

“For the last 18 months or so at BitTorrent we’ve been working with a hand-picked selection of artists, filmmakers, TV producers, DJs, game developers and authors to put their work in front of our users to see if we could generate positive returns. Overall, the results have been staggering. For years academic institutions and even industry organizations like the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) have been publishing studies showing that file-sharers spend more money on content and engage with it at a deeper level. After nearly two years of experiments with content, we now know that to be true.

“We helped Pioneer One, a TV show pilot, reach enough people and generate enough money in donations that the producers were able to fund the entire first season of the show. We distributed a bundle of music for Pretty Lights, a DJ from Colorado, last December. That bundle was downloaded over 6 million times and generated 100,000 new opt-in email sign-ups on Pretty Lights’ website. That’s 100,000 real fans he can engage with and earn income from for the rest of his career. Last month we released a BitTorrent Bundle of new music from Counting Crows, who had asked us to help generate word of mouth to promote their new album. Before working with BitTorrent, they were being mentioned in social media channels once every eight minutes. After we launched the BitTorrent Bundle, they were being mentioned once every two minutes.

“The point of all this is to examine the new business models content creators can build using the BitTorrent ecosystem, and use the results of these experiments to create the tools creators will need to do this better. The internet’s potential as a place where content can thrive has not been delivered on yet. Creators are struggling to release media online in ways that make sense. It’s still hard to build a direct connection to a fan base. We make more giant media files than ever before but it’s still hard to share large files over the Internet using anything other than the BitTorrent protocol. It’s still hard to find the content you want in the format you want it in, and it’s hard for artists to deliver that to their fans. It’s still hard to monetize content in meaningful ways and keep all your data. We hope to change that by using the insights gleaned from these experiments to create the ecosystem creators deserve.

“Peer-accelerated technology is an idea that’s time has come. The BitTorrent protocol has always been the fastest way to move large files. The technology currently moves between 20% and 40% of global web traffic every day, and among other things BitTorrent Inc. is busy working on new ways to monetize content distribution, new uses for peer-accelerated technology and a new live-streaming protocol that has the potential to be as world-changing as the original BitTorrent technology.”

You know media manipulation is rampant when even Greenpeace is doing it. There is no other way to describe the “Arctic Fail” hoax that the environmental group pulled off earlier this week. It was media manipulation in its purest form. It may have been done for noble reasons, but that doesn’t change the salient fact that they are manipulating the media by creating a fake scandal and lying about it to get more coverage.

For those of you who might have seen the viral Arctic Fail video and not heard yet, the clip–in which a drink fountain at party shaped like an oil rig malfunctions and spoils the pretty Alaskan-themed decorations to the horror of many onlookers–was staged. Yet because of widespread media reports, it was overwhelmingly believed to be real and the whole internet enjoyed a nice self-righteous laugh at Shell’s expense.

From what I deduce the roll out went like this:

The Yes Men, an activist prank group, and Greenpeace paid to produce the video, whose main star was a prominent member of the Occupy Seattle movement. Occupy Seattle then posted this video–which they knew to be fake–on their site and claimed it was real. The video was then quickly picked up and reported on by everyone from TreeHugger to Gizmodo and local Seattle press. It racked up nearly 500,000 of its 700,000 views on its first day. To make it look even more real, the parties involved actually set out fake legal messages on behalf of Shell threatening bloggers who reported on the story.

I myself have run a couple of these pranks. I’ll grant you that sometimes it can be difficult for journalists to guard against dishonest people or their elaborate ruses. But I can also tell you from personal experience no one tries very hard. Why would they? Skimming over the news and republishing is the best of both worlds for blogs. It’s cheap, fast, and never has the pesky side effect of ruining a speculative story, and most importantly, it racks up pageviews for blogs (that get billed to advertisers).

As the Seattle Post Intelligencer wrote in its second post on the story, “It’s confirmed that [the video] is an elaborate — make that extremely elaborate – hoax. And, yes, we were fooled. Shame, shame on us.”

Really? Was it that elaborate? Because to me it seemed fairly obvious and it seemed like journalists should’ve been a tad less credulous. More importantly, I don’t see much shame going on here–no sincere apology, no new commitment to more rigorous standards and no real reflection. Instead of being mortified or humiliated by a careless mistake, the media involved in such stunts resort to classic misdirection: now the story becomes how the hoax happened.

From their perspective it’s hard to see what was so unfortunate about it all. It got them 3 times as many pageviews being fake than real. That’s the dirty secret of our iterative, fast paced, publish-first, verify-second model of journalism. When blogs get fooled, it doesn’t cost them anything because they have little credibility to lose. In fact, by their revenue model, it is a profitable success because they get TWO big stories out of an event that actually deserved none (first, covering the fake news as exciting news, then covering their “mistake” as a story about how the prank came to be).

Why It Matters
The reaction for most people, I imagine, is “who cares?” To some extent, I agree. It’s hard to have much sympathy for Shell here. They are, after all, an evil oil company. But as someone who lives in New Orleans, I can tell you, evil oil companies know a thing or two about media manipulation. In the long run, it is far better to force them to be fair and honest as best you can, rather than engage in an arms race you cannot win.

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/15/how-greenpeace-manipulated-the-media-like-a-pro-analyzing-the-shell-oil-hoax/feed/18Tracking Indie Musician Alex Day’s Next Big Movehttp://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/13/tracking-indie-musician-alex-days-next-big-move/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/13/tracking-indie-musician-alex-days-next-big-move/#commentsWed, 13 Jun 2012 13:53:46 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/ryanholiday/?p=400Yesterday, I wrote about Alex Day, a YouTube musician who is turning the music industry on its head. Where is the music press on all this? Sleeping of course.

They not only missed the story on Alex, they missed the significance of his latest move—which I spoke of briefly in my article. The move, which came on May 27th, breaks all the rules: Day decided to release three singles on a single day instead of batching them together in an album. As Day puts it, “Releasing three songs at the same time flies directly in the face of major label conventional wisdom. It’s exactly the opposite to the major label method with acts like Justin Bieber and One Direction.”

And it seems to have worked so far. The songs are well on their way to selling 150,000 copies. Just ONE of the videos has already done more than 300,000 views, and the three have been streamed more than 100,000 times on Bandcamp. But despite all the noise—and thousands of radio requests from Day’s fans in the UK and Australia—hardly anyone in the music industry noticed. I imagine that’s because they can’t see a disruptive model when it’s right in front of them.

To me, this presages a very clear fact: the album as we know it is over.

“Albums are dead as far as I can tell,” says Day. “I don’t mean physical formats are dead, but the concept of an album seems redundant when you can cherry-pick any individual track you like on iTunes anyway. Putting out singles means each song has its own artwork and its own video; it gets its time to shine; it makes me work harder to make sure the songs are good enough to withstand that light; and it’s more interesting for my audience, who are getting new songs from me every few months at the moment instead of once every year or two.”

Why would someone like Day, free from the constraints of a major label, need to arbitrarily package his songs together in a 12-song pack? He wouldn’t. With no real need to appeal to retail stores, with no hope of strong radio sales, this frees him up to go directly to the fans with songs whenever he feels like it.

So just know this: by doing that Day is changing the model right in front of our eyes. All the talk we’ve heard from blogs and gurus in the last few years about the 1,000 true fans model and the future of self-publishing? Well, here it is, on a real scale, doing real volume. He’s the self-made, self-marketing and self-funded musician, and he’s making a killing of it. And instead of giving credit where credit it due, those same talking heads are asleep on the job.

Bob Lefsetz, the music guy that Wired Magazine called the “digital-era pamphleteer,” actually asked Day to ask his fans to stop emailing him because he would never write about him. “This all means nothing to me,” he told him rudely. “When I feel the groundswell from the outside, then I’m intrigued.” You missed the boat Bob, congrats. (also, real mature tweet!). Guys like Bob knew this new kind of star would come one day but couldn’t quite grasp the form it would take when it did. That’s why a 23-year-old British kid writing nerdy pop tunes seems to escape their radar.

I’ll give you Day’s words one last time because I think they make a lot of sense.

“I make pop music. I make it for other people to enjoy. The more people that hear it, the better. And I’m immensely proud of the songs I’ve released; I think they deserve a moment in the spotlight.”

When online star Alex Day got his first two music royalty checks for nearly $200k he had a choice to make. Do I follow the path of other self-made stars like Amanda Hocking (self-published books to a major publishing deal) and buy into the system, or do I continue to blaze my own path?

He chose the latter. He said no to the offer of “a boot on his neck” and decided to go his own way. In this decision, he embodies the musician—the artist—of the future: self-sufficient, self-funded, and self-motivated. And now, with the launch of three new singles, he’s a pioneer of a new style of releasing and distributing music.

Before we get into that, let’s look briefly at what Alex, at just 23 years old, has already accomplished. In 2006, he started a YouTube channel where he posted his music videos. It quickly took off. In six years, he racked up more than 500,000 subscribers and nearly 100 million views. The songs that accompany these videos? They’ve been streamed more than 1 million times and sold more than 500,000 paid downloads.

His recipe for success was simple: earnest, youthful music with correspondingly playful videos. It might not be for everyone, but there is a whole underserved and loyal market for this material on YouTube, and Alex put more time and passion into than anyone else.

“I make music people enjoy and they buy it,” Day told me over email. “That’s my big trick. If I was only doing it for fame, I could sign with a label. If I was only doing it for money, I could churn out rubbish every two weeks. But I take my time and put out quality stuff I’m proud of, for the love of making great music and sharing it with an audience—the more people that hear it, the better. I want to make things that people can love.”

But there are plenty of people performing for niche audiences online these days. It wasn’t until December of 2011 that Day’s peerless ambition and savvy became clear to me. He emailed me for advice on the launch of a single early in December called “Forever Yours,” with a crazy goal: hitting #1 on the UK charts without a label. Confidentially, I told him it couldn’t be done—not even close. Find a label, I told him. Sign with someone who knows what they are doing. The system will crush you.

I was wrong. On December 18th, his single came out and hit #4 on the UK Charts, with bookmakers strongly predicting a run at the top spot. It eventually did more than 130,000 downloads worldwide and the video was seen more than 4 million times.

Then, in April, Day did it again. Without radio play, his cover of “Lady Godiva” charted at #15, Day’s second Top 20 hit in 4 months . . . as an unsigned artist. Not only that, but, through a random connection with a young fan who begged his or her father, Day’s single had distribution in stores across the UK. Again, as an unsigned artist, Day completely outflanked the record labels, radio, and distributors and went straight to the fans—putting the lion’s share of the earnings in the right pocket: his.

Now that I have a good sense of what Alex Day is capable of as an artist, businessman, and strategist, his next move has my complete support. He’s ignoring the charts all together, and he’s no longer interested in gaming them or chasing them as status symbols. (“The charts don’t matter anymore. Nobody knows or cares who’s #1.”) This realization freed him up to take a bold step: releasing three singles at the same time, which while killing chart placement, is better for the fans and for the music.

“One’s an original song by me, one’s a cover, one’s an unreleased track,” Day said. “I’m encouraging people to tell me their favourite and it’s pretty evenly spread. Instead of pushing to one crazy week, this time I wanna try and build it across the three months, we’re spreading out the releases of the music videos and the main thing I’m asking my audience to do is just to tell people.”

Now, the charts that matter aren’t Billboard; they’re iTunes and Amazon (and he’s already hit the Top 40 there with all the songs). He doesn’t need a label’s help there. Or an agent, or any other so-called “professional.” Not with a huge YouTube fan base and nearly 100,000 Twitter followers. He’s a self-sustaining machine.

“I’ve had talks with all the major labels,” Day said, “but I reckoned they were trying to sign me in order to squash me; they hate the fact that I proved you can get songs out there without any corporate involvement”.

Now compare that with Amanda Hocking, who after selling millions of books herself on Amazon, willingly submitted to a deal with an antiquated publishing house. (“I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.” No, Amanda, now you’re a wholly owned subsidiary.) With an eye towards clocking 150,000 downloads Alex isn’t afraid of doing the work himself. That’s what motivates him. That’s what makes him the musician of the future.

I’ve been working for years to work with the system to little success but once I struck out on my own, things started happening in a huge way. My biggest asset is raw energy—I’ll keep reaching out to people, pushing the song out, working on music, I never get bored of it because I know I’ll regret it if I don’t look back thinking ‘I did everything I could.’

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/12/is-youtube-and-chart-sensation-alex-day-the-future-of-music/feed/31How to Turn Pro, From the Warrior Artist, Steven Pressfieldhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/07/10-steps-for-turning-pro-from-the-warrior-artist-steven-pressfield/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/07/10-steps-for-turning-pro-from-the-warrior-artist-steven-pressfield/#commentsThu, 07 Jun 2012 15:47:34 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/ryanholiday/?p=362I don’t remember when I first read The War of Art, but I know it changed my life. Of all of the books I have read since then, there are few I have returned to more often. Why? Because Steven Pressfield teaches you how to be an artist—a professional one.

There is a reason that every writer, producer, blogger, and designer I know has a copy of his book in their studio (besides me putting it there). It worked for them too. He taught them how to fight the resistance, how to believe in themselves, find their muse, and dedicate themselves to their craft. He sold them on the dream of turning pro.

And now Pressfield is back to pick up where he left of with Turning Pro. The first words grabbing you by the collar and pulling you down the path: “I wrote in the War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.”

See, we all have a job to do, be it art or business or acting or philanthropy, and we spend far too much time running from this job, doing everything but what we were born to do. This is because we are not professionals. We have not learned how to turn pro. I would never make it seem that Turning Pro is something that can be reduced or simplified. The journey is too complex, too personal for that. It is a journey of many, many steps. So with that in mind I will give you just ten of them.

Admit You’re an Addict

“We burn to accomplish something great, but don’t know where to begin…Enter: a drink, a lover, a habit. Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins out over the long slow haul.”

Hit Bottom

“I applaud your story of how you hit bottom, because at the bottom there is no one there but yourself.”

Ignore the Opinions of Others

“The amateur craves third-party validation. The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is excepted of him. He is impressed by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be.”

Have Empathy (For Yourself)

“In his heart, the amateur knows he’s hiding. He knows he was meant for better things…If the amateur had empathy for himself, he could look in the mirror and not hate what he sees. Achieving this compassion is the first powerful step toward moving from being an amateur to being a pro.”

Work the Program

“Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It’s a decision to which we must re-commit every day. Twelve-step programs say “One Day at a Time.” The professional says the same thing.”

Have Your Epiphany

“The essence of epiphanies is the stripped away of self-delusion. We thought we were X. Now suddenly we see we’re minus-X. We’re X divided by infinity. There is great power in this moment.”

Embrace Ambition

“Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred and fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.”

Cut Out Distraction

“The amateur tweets. The pro works.”

Become a Creature of Habit

“The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. We can trade in the habits of the amateur and the addict for the practice of the professional and the committed artist or entrepreneur.”

Play for Tomorrow

“Our role on tough-nut days is to maintain our composure and keep chipping away. We’re pros. We’re not amateurs. We have patience. We can handle adversity. Tomorrow the defense will give us more, and tomorrow we’ll take it.”

By the time you have taken these steps, you will be well down the road of an artistic calling. You will have wrestled for control of your fate, as Machiavelli wrote, and spoken to it in the only language it understands: sheer force of will. And you will have turned pro. I’ll close with one more quote from Pressfield:

“Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work.”

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/06/07/10-steps-for-turning-pro-from-the-warrior-artist-steven-pressfield/feed/3Evil Analytics: How What You Measure Becomes Your Masterhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/29/evil-analytics-how-what-you-measure-becomes-your-master/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/29/evil-analytics-how-what-you-measure-becomes-your-master/#commentsTue, 29 May 2012 17:29:26 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/ryanholiday/?p=339An analogy: In wars where capturing territory is not a clear objective, commanders must create new metrics to measure success. That may seem like a fairly innocuous logistic dilemma but it’s not. It has, historically, created some of the very worst atrocities in American history.

Take Vietnam. Unable to judge victory or defeat by outposts, fortifications or land, the United States settled on “body count” as its metric. Attrition and atrocities quickly ensued. As economists like to say, incentives matter. Body count creates the very worst kinds of incentives: indiscriminate killing.

Of course, it also breeds fabrication, a distorted picture of tide of war, and ultimately in America’s case, conflicted with the grand strategy of its supposedly noble mission. Despite the obvious lessons from this blunder, few learn from the example of “evil” metrics. (In fact, we continued the body count policy in Iraq to similar results).

Unfortunately, the data-driven nature of the web and marketing exacerbates the pressure for metrics. It similarly bowls over the consequences of what those metrics incentivize. No one understands this better than Sep Kamvar, Google‘s former leader on personalization and one of the creators of iGoogle. As the founder of Kaltix, one of the first companies Google acquired (pre-IPO), Kamvar has long studied data and what it means for user experience. But unlike other data scientists, he’s an artist whose work has been displayed everywhere from MoMA to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens and his book We Feel Fine. It’s the side of him that gave him to empathy to see the difference between raw metrics and metrics that matter–that create good things.

Now a professor of Media Arts at MIT, he’s an expert on the consequences of metrics, be it in media, technology, psychology and even the arts. He and I have both seen so many companies obsessed by silly pseudo-metrics (from clicks to pageviews to “view through orders”) for very little gain. I’ve talked to Sep about this subject a lot and nothing I could say expresses it better than his own words. So, I give you his deeply philosophical and important essay: Missions and Metrics.

—

There is an old Zen story about a man riding a horse, galloping frantically down a path. His friend, who is sitting by the side of the road, calls out “Where are you going?” The man replies: “I don’t know. Ask the horse!”

When we build our tools, we often depend on metrics to guide our development. We keep graphs of unique visitors and pageviews and watch them closely. This keeps us honest. It’s hard to convince anybody that we’re building a useful tool if our metrics show that nobody is using it.

But we must take care when we use metrics. Metrics can be like the horse in the old Zen story. Once we decide on them, they have a habit of setting the agenda. As the old adage goes, what gets measured gets managed.

The standard metric for a country’s economic welfare is GDP. I find this strange. If the government decided to give millions of dollars to the country’s richest people so that they can buy yachts from one another, that would increase GDP. So would clearcutting our national forests to build strip malls, outsourcing the raising of our children, and incarcerating large swaths of our poor.

If we temper the language a bit, we might find that this description is not so far from reality.

My point is that metrics shape behavior. Joseph Stiglitz describes this mechanism nicely: “What we gather our information about, and how we describe success, affects what we strive for.” Political leaders who want to grow the economy, he says, will focus policies on things that increase GDP, even when GDP does not correlate with societal well-being.

Which brings me to my second point: All metrics leave something out. Often, they leave the most important things out.

The New York Times reports last week that 1 out of every 10 Wall Street bankers is a psychopath. The San Francisco Bay Citizen and Gawker report on a potentially racist new ad campaign from American Apparel.

Neither story is true. Both are fruit of the poisoned tree—the tree of poor internet sourcing.

“It is then only a short leap to the so-called newspaper of record, which was happy to serve up to the public this non-existing study, which like much else demonizes financiers, as a scientific finding. As a result, we now have mad men of Wall Street running amok in the public imagination.”

In American Apparel’s case, the chain is even sadder and more embarrassing. On May 19th, a comedian named Fahim Anwar tweeted a link to an ad on American Apparel’s advertising archive which featured a female model and a California farmer named Raul. Gawker saw it (or more likely, was tipped) and wrote a posted about it titled: “American Apparel’s Hottest New Accessory: Farmers.” Their post did more than 40,000 views. As is expected, the article is riddled with inaccuracies. For starters, the ad wasn’t new—it ran in 2011—and there was nothing exploitative about it. Raul happened to be a family friend of the photographer.

From Gawker, it traveled from site to site, including ultimately, to the San Francisco Bay Citizen (which for the last two years provided coverage to the New York Times). As I told the reporter there who emailed me for comment: “Honestly, we’re not sure what the problem is. Raul is a family friend and the photos turned out great, so we developed them into an ad and put it on our website. The whole controversy seems a bit contrived.”

Did this comment and an explanation about the contaminated chain of evidence change the reporter’s mind? Of course not, he still compared the ad to a variety of other racist advertisements and claimed the ad was part of a “campaign.” It wasn’t and I think the fact that it ran one time a year ago makes that pretty obvious.

It didn’t stop this reporter, just like the subsequent revelations to the New York Times didn’t warrant a retraction of their story. The Times, while admitting that it had misstated the findings and that the study about psychopaths was unrepresentative and non-scientific, would only “correct” the errors, leaving the faulty conclusions made from them as they were. As Poynter.org observes:

“In the end, the result is an op-ed that at the very least lost one major data point in its argument. What remains is a viewpoint without a compelling stat to back it up. Does that negate the opinion? Or just make make it less persuasive?”

It absolutely negates the opinion. Just like the salient facts in the American Apparel story—that the ad was a year old, that the source was a comedian, and that the ad was in perfectly good taste—made it a deliberately contrived controversy.

Why does this happen? Because there are pageviews in it. Accusations and controversies make for great headlines. A dubious source, properly laundered on other blogs first, are all it takes for an eye-catching headline. A click is a click, whether or not the story turns out to be true. The fact that companies like American Apparel get stuck dealing with the negative insinuations and implications—or in the other case, that flimsy science indicts a whole industry of people—doesn’t matter.

Now you have a glimpse at how your fake news gets made. It is started by sketchy bloggers and made real by reporters at the most prestigious outlets in the nation. As I told Epstein when he interviewed me for his piece: “Headline-grabbing reality manufacturing such as this is the bread and butter of pageview hungry blogs. For better or worse, this pseudo-news dominates the Web.”

Read at your peril.

Disclosure: I fielded the press requests from the Bay Citizen in my capacity as a marketing director and advisor for American Apparel.

In 2007, before Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen published a prescient critique of Web 2.0 culture titled The Cult of the Amateur, a book that anticipated many of the problems of the web today. It was, thankfully, a runaway bestseller.

I read that book as a young Hollywood executive (my copy still stained with food and drink from stealing away to read it at lunch) and it opened my eyes to a darker side of the web. One that wasn’t all breathless cheerleading and cyber utopianism. Keen forced me look critically at the digital trends of 2006, 2007, 2008 and see them for what they were: mostly fluff, often destructive and purely for the benefit of a few rich moguls who cloaked their control in the rhetoric of empowerment.

As both an accomplished academic and an internet entrepreneur, Keen was able to cut through all this self-interest and distraction and portray it as it was. He has largely been proven right. Despite proclamations that we’d all be making our living from blogs, hardly any of us do. Journalism hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse (and less profitable). Digg is dead, long live Reddit (nobody gets paid on either). Studios are still in control of television and movies (and what we watch still sucks). Radio is ruled by a few elite stars. After all, instead of democratizing the music industry, YouTube just gave us Justin Bieber.

Andrew Keen on why 1984 is upon us
“In January 2011, four months after Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge, a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs released a geo- location app called WhereTheLadies.at which enables men to aggregate foursquare data to track local bars or clubs popular with women. And a couple of months after that, some other entrepreneurs started up Whoworks.at, an app that—deploying LinkedIn data—reveals where we work.

Yet, instead of WhereTheLadies.at or Whoworks.at, what really lies on the five-year horizon is WhereI’m.at. That’s the Orwellian future of the Internet. WhereI’m.at—however chilling for those of us who still cherish our illegibility—is being embraced in Silicon Valley where Ownlife has already been dumped into the dustbin of history. [Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn] is far from alone in declaring privacy to be dead. “The progression toward a more public society is apparent and inevitable,” predicts the gleefully deterministic Jeff Jarvis about our hypervisible age. And technology titans like Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, ex–Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, Techcrunch founder Mike Arrington and social media uber-evangelist Robert Scoble all concur, declaring privacy to be little more than a corpse. While Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president whose new company, you’ll remember, is planning to eliminate loneliness, says simply that privacy “isn’t an issue.” In the twenty-first century, they agree, all information will be shared. Individual privacy is a relic, they say. It has a past, but no future.

For many of these supposed visionaries, the death of privacy is no different, in principle, from the retirement of the horse and cart or the disappearance of gaslights from city streets. “Today’s creepy is tomorrow’s necessity,” Sean Parker thus argues. The disappearance of privacy is a casualty of progress, Parker and his fellow entrepreneurs promise us, just another consequence of technological change. Yet these entrepreneurs and futurists are blinkered by their ability to only look forward, onto that five-, ten-, or fifty- year horizon. They have no interest or knowledge in the history of privacy, in the intimate connection between individual liberty and individual autonomy, in the consequences on Ownlife of today’s universal digital dormroom.

…

Yes, it all seems so chillingly Orwellian. George Orwell would have probably agreed with [Reid Hoffman] that the future is always sooner and stranger than we think. Writing in 1948, Orwell imagined a future in which SnoopOn.me and the Creepy app had become the law. “In principle a Party member had no

spare time, and was never alone except in bed,” Orwell wrote in Nineteen- Eighty-four. “It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a neologism for it in Newspeak: Ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.”

]]>http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/23/andrew-keen-why-1984-is-upon-us-digital-vertigo/feed/3Why the Media Loves Writing About Facebook’s IPO (or Any IPO, Scandal or Lawsuit)http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/18/why-the-media-loves-writing-about-facebooks-ipo-or-any-ipo/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/05/18/why-the-media-loves-writing-about-facebooks-ipo-or-any-ipo/#commentsFri, 18 May 2012 13:35:53 +0000http://blogs.forbes.com/ryanholiday/?p=301You may be curious about the rash of hugely popular, negative pre-IPO stories about Facebook in the last few days. If you weren’t, think about them: Eduardo Saverinwithdrawing his US citizenship. NPR’s Facebook stunt with a pizza company. My story about Facebook advertising was the top read story on Forbes and did more than 65,000 views in 24 hours.

The same thing happened to Groupon’s IPO. And LinkedIn and basically any IPO. The media rushes to write not only negative, but usually highly speculative or controversial pieces about the company that is about making its lucrative offering. Why? I’ll tell you, it’s not just about capturing a popular SEO-trend. The real reason is much more insidious. It all comes down to exploiting a single fact: the reporter has complete freedom to write the “facts” however they want while the company is gagged by the SEC’s quiet period regulations.

“a quiet period extends from the time a company files a registration statement with the SEC until SEC staff declare the registration statement “effective.” During that period, the federal securities laws limit what information a company and related parties can release to the public. The failure to comply with these restrictions generally is referred to as “gun-jumping.”

That’s right. The media, from bloggers to the New York Times, love pre-IPO stories because they can be as one-sided as they like. The reporters get to do the “gun-jumping” because the company is legally prohibited from the role. Think about it: all the negative Facebook stories I mentioned technically could have been written some time ago. Saverin renounced his citizenship months ago, Facebook has long been overvalued. My story, which some might call similarly timed, was actually only in response to a story published by the New York Times which dropped the “bombshell” that Facebook ads don’t work (my response: They’ve never worked). It’s not a coincidence that they were written now.

The worst part is that the types of stories that scream out to be written and broken when the subject cannot respond are precisely the types of stories that cannot be taken back. The scandals, the controversies, and the shocking announcements spread so quickly. They stick too easily. And the subject is obligated, essentially, to just bend over and take it—often at the cost of millions or potentially, billions of dollars.

Look at the NPR story which paid a small pizza pop up shop to run Facebook ads and then reported on the poor showing. What’s missing? There isn’t a single quote from anyone at Facebook. Nor are there the fingerprints of a PR person on the story, correcting its subtle inaccuracies and steering the story in a fair direction. (For instance, it says their “ads went viral” because they did 700,000 views. Um, that’s what you paid for, NPR. That’s not “going viral.”)

Those quotes and influence usually have the effect of neutralizing the press and bloggers. It allows Facebook or any company to get its perspective across and to prevent the reporter’s impulse—the one that pushes them to post the most interesting story possible, not the most true story possible—from running out of control. But in the silent period, these inhibitions are gone and companies become defenseless targets.

A quick scan of all the press about Facebook today confirms this. It is a bunch of semi-informed bloggers and reporters outbidding each other to write the most extreme, most negative (or delusionally positive), more clickable and spreadable stories about Facebook that they can. Because they know that Facebook cannot respond and the reporter is not slowed down or obligated to wait for this response.

This kind of journalism, fed by controversy, rumors, and titillating scandals, is a beast that gives no quarter. Those who have never been on the other side of this equation don’t realize that it is precisely in situations like a scandal, an IPO, a lawsuit, or a tragic event that the subjects of the story are least able to communicate with the press. Legal reasons may preclude commenting publicly; SEC rules forbid speaking with the press; personal shame or simply the overwhelming nature of dealing with the event may make it impossible to response to every single media inquiry immediately. It is with the stories upon which we most need to tread lightly, to speak carefully on behalf of those who cannot speak, that bloggers are unwilling to do so, because it is not in their interest. And it’s extra scary to think that journalists actually relish the opportunity when the standards of their profession are relaxed.

Forcing someone to bite their tongue while others spread preposterously untrue allegations is the worst kind of torture. (Ask yourself why lawyers like to time class action lawsuits around public offerings. Answer: leverage). When the the accusations inevitably turn out to be wrong (or have less than the whole story), the subjects find themselves asking the same question that wrongly disgraced former United States secretary of labor Ray Donovan asked the court when he was acquitted of false charges that ruined his career: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

Unfortunately, there is no office. Who knows where Facebook is supposed to go to be reimbursed for the cost of the flurry of deliberately timed negative stories right before its stock was available to the public? Who knows what it ultimately could or did cost them? I feel my conscience is clear with my story—however unexpectedly popular it turned out to be—because it was based on direct professional experience and written long before Facebook announced an IPO. Others, I’m not so sure. All I know is that it’s scary to think that it isn’t Facebook that is manipulating the media for profit and gain, it’s the media that is.